Community Innovation in Sustainable Energy

Community-led sustainable energy projects are flourishing in the UK. Community projects involve local groups developing low carbon energy solutions appropriate to local situations, and with community groups having ownership over outcomes. Examples include solar water heating clubs, or insulation clubs, which provide mutual support for system installation; energy awareness and behaviour networks, which provide guidance and reassurance to neighbours on energy matters relevant to them; and co-operatively-owned small-scale renewable energy systems, such as micro-hydro and wind. The Government's Low Carbon Community Challenge joins a portfolio of policies helping innovative community projects. It is argued these will nurture local support for wider processes of low carbon energy transition. Intermediary organizations, such as local and national energy agencies, span local groups through their technical advice, and helping new community projects access resources and networks. If renewed policy interest is to lead to effective institutional support, then evidence is needed about community diffusion processes, performance, and interaction with mainstream energy systems. Independent academic analysis struggles to keep pace with the extent of innovation or to document the diversity of community activity involved. Little is known about the conditions under which community-led innovations do or do not diffuse. The processes by which similar projects replicate in different communities remain unclear. Opportunities for scaling-up projects so that follow-on projects benefit wider sets of local community are similarly obscure. And the possibilities that community-led innovations may provide adaptable and appropriable sustainability solutions that can be translated into mainstream energy market settings has yet to be seriously considered. Our aim is to analyse community energy in order to understand its diffusion and explain its potential in wider energy transitions. We divide community energy into three broad fields - community renewable, community demand reduction, and community awareness-raising/behaviour-support. We wish to see whether diffusion over the last ten years in each field is leading to the development of standard community models that replicate more readily, can be scaled-up, or can be translated into mainstream business settings.We will meet this aim through an engaged research approach that will deliver on four specific objectives: 1. Analyse how diverse community-led projects diffuse through processes of replication, scaling-up, and translation; 2. Evaluate the performance of local community energy projects and assess their potential in wider low carbon transition processes (using UK Foresight scenarios); 3. Provide critical reflection and empirically-backed recommendations for national policy-makers and key energy companies on how to support community approaches to everyone's mutual benefit; 4. Develop and advance innovation theory appropriate to community-led sustainable energy. A web-based survey will be complemented with in-depth case studies. Interviews with community energy intermediaries, policy-makers and businesses will complement a content analysis of 'best practice' reports. Stakeholder workshops will develop four UK Foresight scenarios for community involvement in energy and the built environment in the future, and their contribution to different low carbon transition pathways. Final analysis and synthesis will lead to clear recommendations for policy. Our proposal contributes to the EPSRC-EdF call on the social and economic sciences of People, Energy and Buildings by: a) explaining how local communities intervene in energy systems; b) quantifying their role in the diffusion of energy efficient technologies and local renewable energy; and c) assessing how community energy projects could contribute to UK energy systems under a range of future scenarios.

The impacts we anticipate from this project fall into four main categories (instrumental, conceptual, mobilisation and wider impacts), outlined below. We envisage three key audiences for the findings of this project: the academic community, energy practitioners, and policymakers. Our communication, engagement and dissemination plans are described in the Academic Beneficiaries section and the Impact Plan, respectively. Here we summarise the expected impacts of those combined activities. Instrumental impacts The research will generate evidence-based policy recommendations to enable policymakers to better support and harness the energies and solutions emerging from community-led innovations for sustainability. This will be framed in such a way as to inform the development of indicators, and contribute to improved policy-effectiveness, particularly around community engagement and behaviour change, and will enable the UK to better achieve its sustainability and climate change policy goals. We have already received positive feedback from DECC, CDF, NESTA and other bodies on the timeliness and necessity of this work. Indeed, a result of these conversations, in some cases, has already been to connect policy-makers and advocates to one another. In addition, the stakeholder engagement with practitioners which is fundamental to this project will deliver concrete impacts for those participants and their wider networks in terms of learning and networking to share experiences and best practice, which will result in increased capacity and effectiveness at the grassroots. Conceptual impacts This is UK-based research but it is set within an international interdisciplinary literature. It will feed into international research networks, and make significant and timely theoretical contributions to knowledge and debates in three key bodies of literature: sustainable innovation studies, sustainable energy, and sustainable communities. Our contribution will be an advancement of strategic niche management innovation theory adapted to the new community-based site of innovation in systems of provision, and the generation of new empirical data which illuminate that theory. This will bring direct benefits to a number of related disciplines through the development of new theory to better understand social processes for sustainable development at the community level. Consequently, our research will improve understanding about a new and under-researched area of innovative activity, and will help to develop this new and emerging research agenda. Mobilisation impacts This project aims to foster new relationships between policymakers and practitioners of innovative community projects, in order to promote new thinking on both sides, about the role and potential of community innovations for sustainability. Our Advisory Panel will work closely with us to nurture these new connections, and they will be instrumental in achieving the mobilisation goals of the project, in particular through regular web-based updates, leading to the final stakeholder workshop. This event will be designed to bridge the policy divide between community action and innovation for sustainability, and raise the policy profile of community innovation. It is hoped that this in turn will result in increased mobilisation of resources, institutional support and policy recognition for community-led energy projects to help them to achieve their potential. Wider impacts The potential wider impacts of this research are of course difficult to predict, but we anticipate that by forging a new research agenda around community innovation in sustainable energy, and disseminating our findings widely among practitioners and policy circles, we can contribute to a new way of thinking about community-led innovations for sustainability which acknowledges the importance (and limits) of community action in innovation for sustainability.